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Recently i tested out using my recording ap on my tablet. Started with the dribbles I wrote last year. For those who dont remember dribbles are stories of exactly 25 words. Reading your own work is something we all should do but it does feel weird. I plan on posting them up once I find a program to convert the gpp file to mp3. Seems my lenovo tabley records in gpp, which as far as I can see is not accepted in the various places for sharing sound files.

The second part issue is finding a place to post up these files. I have a bunch of my poems I recorded before my desktop died that are up on my old Myspace page but it looks like only music is over there now. And to be honest I never actually gained any traction on that social site.

So anyone have suggestions? While I have a YouTube site (two actually but I can not lig into the first one) I doubt straight audio would get views. I used to post my book trailers and aome fun photo videos over there. Maybe if I decide to do an snimated short versus the illustrated shorts I am working on but that is future.

So if you are intetested in hearing my reading of my work please tell me where I can put them. There are fifteen dribbles recorded and about twenty five poems. I will be recording my drabbles, quickie fictions. Probsbly everything I have under a thousand words. Given a place to put them and working equipment.

Yes i have been behind. Not putting out work like I should. So this week I will put up some of my drabbles for your reading pleasure.

Green Magic morning

by Lisa Williamson

The glow in the sky matches that underneath the water at my feet. Rich in greens and golds the lady Earth has pulled back her skirts to show the magic below and above us. Only one this day and this place can a simple man see what she hides inside. Long have I searched for the meaning of life, of the wonders that make life worth living but today she showed me. A simple thing really, that we are all part of the life that surrounds and makes us. Bodies, minds and spirits are bound with the world around us.

***

The Painted Sky
By Lisa Williamson

The sun sets painting the sky in umber and lavender as I sit on the rocks and watch the birds. My coracle rests at waters edge and I wonder just why I came here. I should be home watching the day dance into night but instead I sit here and wonder why the sky is the color it is. When did the blue of the morning sky become the way it is now? When did the world change from day to night? Did it slip past my wandering mind on kitten feet? Or did I simply lose track of time?

***

Listen to the Flowers
by Lisa Williamson

Shhhh, listen to the song of the flowers. The wind lifts it to your ears if you stop your chatter. See the colors of life, hear the soft laughter and find yourself. Remember what it was like to be a child, finding wonder in to smallest things. Before time aged you and took away your joy.

Listen my parent, listen my child, remember the days when things as small as a flower brought a smile to your face, laughter to your heart. So please be quiet, please stop talking, just this once, listen to the flowers, listen to the wind.

***

Path through the Dark Forest

The path twists its way through the dark trees. To each side you hear the rustling and slithering of beasts unseen. Stay on the path, young one. For it is only on the path that you will make it out of this place. Keep walking slow and steady; do not be tempted to leave the path toward the light if you want to see the day again. Keep your eyes ahead and your step firm. Ignore what you hear, no matter who calls you. Nothing in this place is what it seems and I beg you to keep going. Reach safety, young questor and you will be the first to do so.

***

A prison of my own
By Lisa Williamson

Eight by eight, that is all the space I have. I have a bed, a shelf and a window, with no room to pace. I lie staring out that window at the rain as it slides down the window. The room is small, yet I feel safer here. This prison of my own making, filled with things that only I find comforting. Others wonder why I stay in this place, how I can live in a room so small, but they don’t wee what I see out the window of my room. It is not a prison but a haven.

Yup the holiday is coming up. Thursday all the Americans on my list will hopefully be with their friends and families, eating good food and remembering why they are thankful. I have been sitting here in Canada thinking about Thanksgiving and all the things I am thankful for over the past year.

Of course on the top of the list are my loved ones. My sweet husband who works so hard to support myself and our daughter. Who helps me write fight scenes by telling me how it should go and who was so very helpful with those science fiction things like space ships and the weapons and engines they would have. He is a wonderful man who has made my life so much easier and I thought I would take this week to tell him so.

I am thankful for all three of my daughters. From the two who I miss so much who are living lives so far away from me, to the fun and silly now twelve year old who lives with her father and I. My heart has grown so big just loving those three girls.

I am thankful for my parents. My mom and stepdad who live so far away from me. I hope that even with the trials they are going through that they will have a wonderful day and that things get better.

Now this is supposed to be my writing blog right? Yes I have been writing new things. I haven’t dived deeply into a longer project because of just releasing the Echoes of Elder Times collection last week. It hasn’t moved more than a couple copies but i am thankful both for the sales and for the five star review that went up yesterday!

But back to Thanksgiving right? Yes I have been writing some fun little short bits based on this holiday. Thanksgiving happened last month here in Canada but back home it will be this Thursday. So I plan on putting up these little bits on my Facebook author page. One a day (or more) will be put up over there. Some will be funny, some will by dark and some will be personal. This holiday is a mixed bag for me. For years I was the woman who made the feast. At one time I used to feed up to twenty people at my table and it has been fur years now since I have. I miss those days. I miss the crazy day of cooking all those dishes and then the happy and full faces of people who enjoyed what I made. So I will write about them.

Here in fact is one of the quickies i wrote:

Thanking

Place the napkins, light the candles, place the turkey on the table. Sit down, look around and realize that this is a special day. No matter the dishes, no matter the faces, this ay is unlike any other. For this one day a year we thank those who came before us, for those who are with us.

Or that is how it used to be. Now it is a rush to eat so we can go out and spend. What happened to the joy of Thanksgiving, of family and friends in one place? This year, why not settle back and relax. Eat that turkey and remember to thank the person who did all the work. Better yet, thank them by doing the dishes! That’s the ticket.

****

Will this end up in a collection? Maybe. This is a quickie length piece and I don’t yet have enough of those for a collection but who knows.

I have also contemplated putting all my Christmas drabbles, micros and quickies into a book and putting it out around Christmas. Something priced at 99 cents that will be filled with the fun little tales that I have written after doing a lot of holiday research. As for today I am done babbling over here. Time to dive back into writing drabbles, micros and quickies. Hope you all have a great holiday!

Yup another Canada day is nearly here. I have been living up here now for four years and thinking of their national holiday my right wrist gives me a major twinge. I don’t think I will ever forget getting that injury for sure.

but other than the bad wrist I have had a good life up here. I have writing and publishing a lot since I moved up here. Before i moved to Canada my life was too busy with taking care of kids, working and being sick. Here the pressure, while different, is much less. I can create and I am so glad I can.

Over this past week I worked on two battles for the newest WIP. First a knife fight in space. Okay not actually in space but on ship board. Having a resource that I can ask hand to hand combat questions of makes that so much easier. Then i worked out my very first ship to ship battle, again thanks to the live in research specialist.

Trying to understand the physics of space flight and battles is way beyond most of us humans. My hubby gave me a very intelligent answer. What shows like Babylon five or Firefly. They have those ship to ship fights.

Now I have watched both of those and of course enough anime to get the general idea but I still plan on having him read what I have in chapter fifteen to make sure it doesn’t seem lame. Yes I said lame. While I can write, I just am not sure on the battles if they are lame or not.

It looks like once this little bit is done I will be starting the next act of this book. Having the heroine be more a classic heroine that needs to be rescued is different for me. After all most of my female characters will kick butt and take names. Yes I have done the rescue me theme with the heroine from The Knight Protector but I wrote that piece over fifteen years ago. A very different me for sure.

So the thought is do i keep her as a victim or do I let her learn to kick butt? I am not sure. The two lovebirds in this story are not true warriors but the hero was a part of that knife fight on shipboard. Guess we will see right?

This week i did take a little time off to write a flash fiction length tale for an anthology. Something to refresh my mind. It is odd to go from writing in third person past tense science fiction to writing first person present fantasy. A twist of the mind right?

Now today I will be doing all my blogs, maybe write a poem or three, a drabble or two and maybe just maybe I will type up the raw emotional letter i wrote to my now deceased biological dad. I just can’t decide. Should i or should I just forget?

In discussions all over the writerverse one thing we all try to figure out is just where our stories fit in the size category. See there are a lot of publications looking for certain sizes of work. This has been a very confusing thing for me because as any of you who has read my work you know I write stories of all kinds of lengths. So just what type of writer does that make me?

Well when a writer who is part of a serious organization brought up (the SFWA for those who want to know) Here are what the guidelines for size of your tales are.

The Science Fiction Writers of America uses these definitions for it’s Nebula awards, and most people consider them to be pretty standard:

Short fiction: under 7,500 wordsNovelette: 7,500-17,500 wordsNovella: 17,500-40,000 wordsNovel: 40,000 words and up

Shorter stories use different techniques, and have different kinds of subjects, so the Short Mystery Fiction Society subdivides the shortest categories further for their Derringer Awards:

Now I broke down the Flash fiction a little bit more. As there are these little fiction things called drabbles which are 100 words…there for another category, one that I have played with a lot.

So going through all my finished stories I came up with a total of 94 stories that have either been published or will soon be. Yes I have less titles up because I pulled out the stories from the collections and did them separately.

A majority of my tale come out in the short short story category with 51 titles so far. the rest are as follows:

Epic 1

Novels 4

Novellas 4

Novelettes 7

long short stories 17

flash fiction 9

and to round out everything I have drabbles 46

So you can see I have done a lot of writing over the past two years. If you add together the 94 tales to the 46 drabbles you have 140 pieces of fiction that I have written or finished up in two years. This of course is not counting all the poetry I have done. I have no idea if I will keep up this crazy level of work or not but at least by seeing the size i write in it is understandable how I came to have so many out there for the reader to find and enjoy.

Hopefully I will come to an agreement with my two publishers to take the 17 stories they have and put them out separately. I seem to have better luck finding readers for singles than for collections….we will see.

The past week has been a bit difficult for the writer in me. Having what is probably just a head cold has made my thinking processes very very slow. Going through headaches, doziness and fatigue will put you off from thinking much.

Well today I pulled on my big girl panties, sat down and did a little writing. Nothing long but then I wasn’t looking for something long. There is a short story contest from one of the groups I belong to. They gave you an image and you needed to write something under 500 words. Well like a drabble that didn’t seem too hard to do. That was till I got sick.

Well this morning I managed to get a little tale written down and submitted. I don’t think I will place in this contest but it is possible they will publish my little tale in their anthology. Yes another anthology. Not that I won’t at some point put this tale together with all my drabbles and put them out in a collection but I will gladly get any publication.

Now since I have broken the block I had I will try to write other things. I have thoughts about doing more stories about Monica Van Helsing and her side kick Patricia. I had thought they would be a one shot but she has so many other vamperic creatures to hunt down and stop. Having a blood drinking vampire who hunts down the less known vamperic kind might not be totally new but i have read a lot of vampire fiction and I think not too many have taken this direction in their tales.

I had planned on having the Dark Games series be for all my sorta horror but now I think it will be like Harry’s tales. Stories told from these two characters. I will have to come up with something else for the other tales. I just might use the Snow Tales title for a series. I have a number of stories that would fit in that category. From the Snow of course being the first. That story is in the Reflections of the End anthology. That story is really a sort of sequel to Ice but as that is in my Echoes of Elder Times series I will just spin off like i do.

Today I will sit and work out what I think will be good places.

I have put up almost all my tales over on Smashwords. The biggest surprise was having the erotica I put up purchased in a quick order. Five erotic tales bought at the same time. Those sales put A Moving Experience into the best seller rank of my stories. Okay maybe not huge numbers but it has sold more copies than Endings and Ice, which had been my big sellers before now.

So time to work out what goes where and decide if I want to put up my handful of free tales into those existing series.

Yup I am. Instead of working on my next short story I am writing drabbles. I didn’t realize just how much fun these can be when I got introduced to them. One hundred words to tell a tale from an image. As you all know I write short things. Stories, poems and now drabbles. In the past month I have been playing with the drabbles from time to time and I have managed so far to write 32 so far. I just can’t seem to stop doing these. I see images and I snag them so I can write them. I figure 70 more of them and I will put them into a book for my readers to enjoy. Yes put them all in one place and it will be good

I had another person ask me when I will be doing my cookbook this morning. Really that is why I started up the food blog A New England Cook in Canada. It is a place for me to put up my recipes and try to take good images of the food I create. I haven’t learned how to make things look good and taste good at the same time but I will.

as happens too often I seem to have so many ideas and just so much time. Between the short stories, the novels, the poetry collections, the photography, the cooking and baking and just being a wife and mother I am swamped. Today I plan to relax a bit and paint, draw and drabble. Maybe I will take the pineapple I bought and mix it up into frozen treats for the next few days of heat and humidity coming. I just don’t know.

I really should be plugging my work here, there and everywhere but we all know I am lousy at that. I get told by the two small publishers I have that I could be doing much better on sales if I just focused on doing sales but isn’t that their job? Is not my job to be creative and to expand the works that I have out there for people? Maybe I will go into photoshop and do some work today. After all I need to fix the cover for Reflections of the End, the anthology that I am a part of so we can have a paperback. Never mind the fact that I have four short stories all ready finished that I should put up for reading. So much to do and I am feeling so very lazy. I want to play with pictures, drink cold drinks and just be a lazy silly writer fool who needs time off.

Drabbles are very short little stories. No more or less than one hundred words. The idea is to capture a bit of time in a few short words. Take an image and then write down with what your mind comes up with. the Writers Stuff facebook group is doing a lot of these to be added to the anthology we are putting together. I jumped on the bandwagon a bit late thanks to my work on my poetry books. So far I have done a quick handful and I forgot how much fun this can be. Taking that snapshot or image and making a quick tale can be cleansing to the mind and spirit when you are bogged down working on a longer project. Now as most of these little things are done up on an image I don’t own I wont be able to take them and put them in a book (the images that is). So many little short bits that i think in the future I might just put them all together and let people see them for fun.

Here is one I wrote a bit ago. Now the image was of a tree surrounded by water with a huge ringed planet in the sky above it. Just the perfect image for a writer like me right? Here you go

So lonely I sit as the stars flash by. Once I had sisters, brothers and friends, then the water came. We loved the feel of the lapping of the waves, so cool and perfect but they didn’t stop. Washing away all my family, the animals and the land about me. Now I am all that remains. The sky, it has become so bright. Stars I have never seen before fill that sky, planets roll by and wink at me as I wait. Will I wash away like the rest or it is my fate to sit here watching the sky?

Okay I know but when you think about it I have a lot of work out there that would do well if people knew about it on cyber monday. People are expected to shop on line and spend a ton of cold hard cash. I would love if a little tiny bit of it came my way. It would make life a little easier.

Course I am not sure how I would know if it happens or not. I have been very confused by Amazon lately. My ranking as an author has been bouncing up and down like mad. I meant by thousands of spots. I keep going from 200K to 800K to 45K to 800K to now 126K. Now on amazon the lower the number the better you are doing. My ranking has bounced so much that the chart they give you to keep track looks like a line of W. Which is confusing. Then when I go look at my books I had more than half of them showing a rise in ranking anyhere from 8- points to well nearly a million (yeah Gates was way bad and now way good) but I see no sales on my report. Narery a one. Okay there was one for Partings on the German Amazon page..that was weird but nothing else. All I can think is that reporting is off till after Cyber Monday. I would adore coming online Tuesday morning and seeing a bunch of sales. I don’t expect them but I would love seeing them.

Then there is the email I got from a guy on linked in who said he was reviewing All That There Was and giving it four stars. Not a clue where he was doing the review though. I don’t see it on Amazon, Kobo, or Goodreads. Now I am not sure, there are a few other places my work has shown up but I just don’t know where else to look. Would be nice to have a clue right?

I did get a really nice review for Night and Day thought. James Anderson, a writer who is a Canadian read it and put down that my work is like a palate cleanser, perfect for reading between longer books. Yes that is a compliment. And I loved it.

Well the snow seems to be over at the moment. I think. We got quite a bit and the kids have been in and out, tracking snow and mud everywhere. And drinking up lots of my hot chocolate. Good thing I put in a big stash last season huh?

I typed up the notes I had worked on for Christmas Snow. 3715 words down so far. Not a lot compared to some authors but Harry’s tales are supposed to be short. This one may end up longer but we won’t know till i get it done. I need to put on my Christmas music and dig in but since the hubby is home and the kids are in and out I will sit down and work on it tomorrow. Hopefully get a lot done while I am alone.

Now I should work on Traveler. Yes i know it is nearly the end of November and there is no real way for me to write 25K in the few days left but well I did say I was going to work in this one and make a novel out of it. I think I know where to go now so it will move along. Time to get more into the mind of the villain of the piece. I have pretty much set up the heroes after all and the secondary heroes/players. I need to keep the romantic feel to this story I think. It is not quite as dark as my other stuff and i think that is a good thing. After all Nightmares is dark, Endings was darker, Revenge is darker still. Course when you have characters raped, tortured and killed that is what happens right?

Hope you all have had a great holiday and have a great week. I will try to blog a bit more than I have been. Time just gets away from you when you are not looking. Oh yeah. If you want to see what poetry I have playing around out there you can go to my google plus blog page, here: http://sutekothemadwriter.blogspot.ca/

I will also be adding my super shorty short space station stories to my website some time today. The stories are going to be sticking to under 600 words I think. Just little drabbles that are fun for a holiday. So far there is one for Halloween, which is available in two different short story collections out there and then there is one for Christmas. Yeah I missed thanksgiving. I will get that one done after I finish up the New Year’s Eve one that hit me between the eyes. Have fun reading folks!